Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Fair enough! I found the claims for coeliac and eczema and disc herniation absurd also.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Hell, IBD/Crohns are comorbid with depression because they're extremely annoying and debilitating diseases
Sarno is referring to IBS though, not IBD.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Hell, IBS/Crohns are comorbid with depression because they're extremely annoying and debilitating diseases that cause a massive drop in QOL, I'd certainly be sad if not depressed were I diagnosed with that!
IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), not IBD (inflammatory bowel disease), which you’re referring to (IBD encompassing Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis). IBS is the one with no clear etiology, association with previous diagnosis of psychological trauma and/or anxiety and/or depression prior to onset (as well as recent GI infection), and suspicion of involvement of the gut-brain axis.
…As far as I recall.
Incidentally, these works tend to be catered towards the female gaze, and gay men often find M/M fanfiction alien or offputting.
Similarly with bara and yaoi in Japan, though this is by no means a physical law. BL is famously written by women for women.
I mean, we have less obviously-ridiculous examples that still fit the bill:
No, Trans Women Are NOT ‘Biologically Male’
Which try really really hard to downplay sex even as they don’t explicitly deny it as per Moore, and engage in an absolutely heroic motte and bailey to pretend that “Trans Women Aren’t Biologically Male”, which tells me that progressives aren’t very interested in keeping the “male” part of “male woman” (or “female” part of “female man”, for that matter).
Like:
Most people never have their chromosomes tested. They’re not tested at birth, and they’re not tested at regular check-ups. Unless your doctor suspects that something might be wrong with your chromosomes, you’ll probably never have them tested in your life, and you certainly can’t tell a person’s chromosomes by looking at them.
But you could certainly make an accurate guess!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it. Take practically the entire isekai/isegye genre in light novels and manga; I am under the impression that popadantsy had similar elements to it as well.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I don’t think this works out as well as you suggest. Most people don’t know any pigs, but these same people know hundreds of women at least. The social and material context is simply too different for “most famous pigs” including fictional pigs vs “most famous women” including transwomen.
Like, I don’t have a deep-seated aversion to and am quite open to treating genuine trans people with their “adopted sex”, like I did before the whole trans craze blew up in the last decade, simply as a matter of convenience and kindness. I also think there’s likely a small number of people who are genuinely “trans” in the sense that something has gone wrong in their neurobiology. But I don’t think the reasoning you put out is a strong justification for why we should treat trans women as women.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
You read accounts of famous 'geniuses' of old and many of them are noted for being fluent in like 3+ languages, often starting at an early age.
Surely being fluent in 3+ languages starting at an early age is less impressive than being fluent in 3+ languages starting at a late age!
I’ve always been confused about why people emphasize how many languages some 18th century child prodigy speaks. Surely this is the easiest time to pick up a language? And it’s not like it was uncommon to speak multiple languages in antiquity if there was use for it - educated folk in the Byzantine empire would’ve spoken at least Greek and Latin, right? Was “fluency” a much more stringent assessment before the 20th century?
Hmm, I don't think I've noticed myself or other english speakers having trouble with the r or t/ch/ts sounds but maybe it's something that's more pronounced for people who've spoken Japanese their whole lives and there's a nuance that I'm not aware of.
The easiest way I can put it is that I think the た row romanisation, ta/chi/tsu/te/to, is a bit misleading, and the t/ch/ts are actually quite similar if not identical in terms of the thing I’m doing with my mouth during the consonant part.
I think it’s clearest with ち. English-only learners tend to make the ch in ち sound like the ch in church, when I think it’s more like…a cross between ch, ts, and t? There’s much less lower jaw/lip movement than if I say a ch- word in English. The closest English equivalent I can think of would be the ch in itch, but even that can be a bit too heavy on the ch-sound, depending on how you pronounce it.
Similarly with つ - the “s” tends to be overemphasized I think.
I have noticed that the "ふ" sound is a lot breathier or "h-like" than the way English speakers usually pronounce "fu".
Yes! Similar to the above た row kana, pronouncing the は row kana consonants similarly gets ふ closer to the native pronunciation - it’s still recognisably kind of an F sound, but with much more of a H-quality to it.
The vowels in Japanese, German and Spanish are all essentially the same though in my mind (disregarding the umlauted ones in German.) The r in Japanese is similar to the "tap r" in Spanish. Sometimes the "u" in Japanese is a bit like the umlauted u (ü) but it seems a bit more of an affect or personal choice rather than common Japanese, I'm not sure
That’s what I mean, yeah. I find that English-only people trying to pick up Japanese have difficulty with the r (and it contributes to the “lol japanese people always get the L and R in English words wrong”, because what it sounds like is kind of in between the English L and R), but to my ear it sounds very similar to the Spanish flap r (not having learned Spanish but knowing people who speak it).
I definitely think the umlauted u is closer to the general pronunciation of the entire u-column than what English speakers do (which tends to be closer to the oo in roof).
Like, take 内（うち）— my impression of many English-only speakers trying to pronounce that is “oochee”, which sounds atrocious to me.
I find that English natives learning Japanese tend to have issues hearing/pronouncing the “r” sound, the “t/ch/ts” sound (for ち and つ, respectively), and the “f” sound (for ふ) ; even the “u” sound sometimes gets mangled. Is that your experience? My guess is that a Spanish background would help a lot, at least with the “r” sound, and German with “u”.
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
I think this starts to raise questions when there's...
I'm not sure how to put this. I think it has something to do with the noncentral fallacy, but thinking about it for a moment I think it's a bit more broad.
I think the audience would feel somewhat cheated if you:
-
Had a list of the "Greatest Admirals Ever", and put Kirk and Ackbar over Nelson and Yi Sun-Sin; or
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Said you were researching "Oldest bears in the world and how they age" and in actuality you were researching wear-and-tear of bear statues that have lasted for well over a century; or
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Asserted that the war between the GE vs FPA had "the highest body count ever", and it turns out that it's a fictional war between the fictional Galactic Empire vs the fictional Free Planets Alliance from the fictional Legends of the Galactic Heroes.
Something similar is in play when you celebrate "female achievement" when a trans woman is the first person to break into a field or hold some record, or if you find more trans women than cis women working in some certain company after affirmative action in favour of "women" as a category (I've heard someome mention something about this in tech, but it seems too ridiculous to be true from experiences of tech people I know in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, even as a theroetical example it stands)
It seems to me that these sorts of equivocations only work in very specific circumstances and contexts.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I honestly have no clue how I got so lucky. Both women I've dated initiated first. Listening to other men I know it sounds miserable.
I have great sympathy for other Anglosphere men (and, tbh, older women) finding difficulties with romance. I do suspect there is a cultural component in play, though, and it probably doesn't generalise globally.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
See, that's the odd thing to me - I think upper-middle class people would enjoy truffle burgers and lobsters with grits just as well. I certainly like foie gras burgers and truffle burgers (when made well and not with machine truffle oil). In fact does truffle and foie gras not exude a very similar sense of decadence and luxury as caviar? Yet truffle (+ foie gras) gets evaluated as "upper class".
Perhaps it's the relative placement of e.g. a soft serve with gold, which I would see as pure conspicuous consumption and an absolute waste of money, vs. caviar? Though this still does not explain the relative placement of truffle vs caviar.
I guess truffle is a more recent fad?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
2003 had a literal aesthetics change - from the old card frame to the modern card frame. Occasionally Wizards of the Coast will print cards in the old frame as fanservice for nostalgic players (or for people who just like the old frame better, I guess).
The new card frame is generally better for legibility and cleanness, but the old card frame definitely had more atmosphere to it.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I'm surprised at how the researchers sorted upper- and upper-middle-class food. Upper-class food just seems to be cheap food with weird extra shit in it (like gold on a soft-serve) or pairings of peasantry and luxury (grits + lobster), while shit like caviar is upper-middle class? Really?
In what world is a truffle burger upper-class but caviar is upper-middle?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
They are ethnically French, but not French by nationality (In the same way a transsexual male is, following the progressive definitions, a "male woman")
But most people would not say either of these things. They would just say this man is French, and the transsexual is a woman. The race/sex is irrelevant, and if you want to know then you have revealed you are a racist who doesn't see immigrants as real French people / a transphobe who doesn't believe transgender women are women.
I dunno, man. I mean, there's shit like this:
Similarly for the rest of your post, I imagine.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
That's likely because the great dying-off hasn't happened yet; there's two large peaks of people in their 50s and their 70s, and when the currently-70s cohort die off the figures will be more dramatic. Japanese life expectancy is >80 for both sexes.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Low sample size, but 2 out of 2…so 100%?
Not sure if I got very lucky or what.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Especially not after the 30th anniversary edition debacle…
I own several legacy and modern decks that I don’t play with very often anymore. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to buy in paper unless they’re really convinced that MTG is going to be their lifestyle game for a long time and compete.
I speak English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese to varying degrees of fluency; I’d like to pick up a couple more languages someday (maybe something very similar like Korean - my understanding is also that Japanese and Korean are syntactically very alike, and Cantonese sounds quite close to Korean for the same words in many cases, I’m told).
I do browse the internet in Japanese and set most of my display languages to Japanese (the language I am least familiar with), and I read Chinese texts when I can. Even then, it’s difficult trying to maintain proficiency — the lack of a good conversation partner in Mandarin and Japanese in my social circles means that my ability to converse beyond daily chitchat is slipping hard.
It doesn’t help that life is too busy for me to set aside an hour every day just to practice languages!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I believe that is also how Mormons teach language when preparing missionaries for foreign lands - throw them way in the deep end, no more English after the first one or two days. It apparently works! IIRC the missionaries come in completely blind to the language and go out after six weeks with at least a functional grasp of it, which is incredible to me.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?
It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.
A related question - do examples like these (where apparently prestigious or large institutions have something batshit going on) change your calculus on progressive power?
I think I share the basic intuition that most people, even quite left-leaning, aren’t actually insane, and are quite reasonable in discussion. But I think I depart from your viewpoint in that I think there are a lot more people that just regurgitate progressive shibboleths without really thinking it through (as I know quite a few, and I’m not even in the US!), who moderate their internal opinions if they are given a chance to actually review what they say; and that I’m not incredibly surprised by incidents like the above happening, because the insane wing of the movement has shown itself to be able to punch way above its weight in various ways.
(For what it is worth, my read is that this well of power and - to borrow a word - privilege is running increasingly low now, and it was never to a point where the ideological capture threatened the entirety of society - just the most obnoxiously vocal parts.)
I suppose what I’m asking is - what are you continuously surprised by?
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